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An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no…
According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…
In a physical system, changing parameters such as temperature can induce a phase transition: an abrupt change from one state of matter to another. Analogous phenomena have recently been observed in large language models. Typically, the task…
The Zipf's law is the major regularity of statistical linguistics that served as a prototype for rank-frequency relations and scaling laws in natural sciences. Here we show that the Zipf's law -- together with its applicability for a single…
We inspect the deductive connection between the neural scaling law and Zipf's law -- two statements discussed in machine learning and quantitative linguistics. The neural scaling law describes how the cross entropy rate of a foundation…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…
In this work we study on a 2-dimensional square lattice a recent version of the Naming Game, an agent-based model used for describing the emergence of linguistic structures. The system is open-ended and agents can invent new words all along…
Zipf's law is found when the vocabulary of long written texts is ranked according to the frequency of word occurrences, establishing a power-law decay for the frequency vs rank relation. This law is a robust statistical property observed…
This article investigates scaling laws within language families using data from over six thousand languages and analyzing emergent patterns observed in Zipf-like classification graphs. Both macroscopic (based on number of languages by…
Can artificial communities of agents develop language with scaling relations close to the Zipf law? As a preliminary answer to this question, we propose an Automata Networks model of the formation of a vocabulary on a population of…
We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…
Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that the human brain represents information in a geometric structure (for instance, through conceptual spaces). In order to communicate, we flatten the complex representation of entities and their…
This article studies a biased version of the naming game in which players located on a connected graph interact through successive conversations to bootstrap a common name for a given object. Initially, all the players use the same word B…
The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
We examine a variant of the Naming Game, where agents having several words communicate more often than single-word agents. Depending on the preference and dimensionality, the model either converges to a single-language state as in an…
Here we present a new class of optimality for coding systems. Members of that class are displaced linearly from optimal coding and thus exhibit Zipf's law, namely a power-law distribution of frequency ranks. Within that class, Zipf's law,…